On Dec 12, 2008, at 9:44 AM, Kai-Martin Knaak wrote: > On Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:20:00 -0700, John Doty wrote: > >>> The issue of printing schematics is going to be one which just about >>> every Windows user is going to bump their head against. > > Not only windows users. I am weary to flex my scripting muscles for > workitems I do just once a week. > > >>> The concept of >>> running scripts (or even programmes) from a command prompt is >>> just not >>> a part of most users paradigms - even engineers, to my surprise. >> >> gEDA's a flexible toolkit that supports multiple flows. > > No, it does not.
Of course it does. I've been using it for six years, and I've used it in five different schematic->PCB flows, and also a VLSI flow. > Support for a GUI oriented printing is minimal. The simplest things (page->ps and page->png) are supported well. > Even the > most common tasks like PDF output of the current schematic need non- > trivial customization. See the wiki faq on this. What makes you think somebody else's GUI will do what *you* want here? > > >> Scripting is a critical part of this. Anyone who can't do scripting >> is going to be in for endless frustration: printing is just a tiny >> issue. > > In other words: It does not properly support a GUI driven work-flow. I am absolutely certain that any GUI driven work-flow will be wrong for most of my (multiple, disparate) purposes. In the bad old days of Viewlogic I had to "reverse engineer" parts of the GUI work flow to script what I needed (even just to pass the right command-line options to pspice, grumble). And I bet you'd have the same experience. > > >>> Getting a multipage schematic print out from gschem is a >>> (relatively) >>> complex task. >> >> Nah. And how are you going to fix this? For example, how do you >> decide >> *which* pages belong to *which* schematic? > > Let the user decide which pages to print and create a customized > print- > config file from the input of the user. What if you want to include things other than schematics in the document? > Just an example how this might > fit in the current GUI: > > 1) Let the printing dialog open a page manager window with the > additional > button "Create Batch Print Config". This button will create and save a > config file to print all the schematics currently selected. > > 2) Add the print action "print batch" to the file menu. This action > will > ask for a batch print config file to actually do the printing. > > If the "config file" is actually a makefile, the batch print action > would > be trivial to implement. An additional benefit would be, that batch > printing could be done offline. This GUI approach wold mix well with a > scripting oriented work flow. It's a hard thing to do right. GUI-generated scripts tend to be pretty inflexible. You are welcome to try. > > >> With gEDA, make, and other tools, it's easy to assemble project >> documentation, as comprehensively as the project needs. > > No it is not. You need to be fluent in some scripting language to > come up > with a solution from scratch. A computer is best used to *automate* your work, not to substitute one kind of manual labor for another. It's faster and easier for me to draw schematics with pencil and a template, and then make copies at the photocopier. But, of course, there's much else that's inefficient with that flow. GUI tends to get in the way of automation, especially in cases where different users (or even a single user like me wearing different hats) have very different needs. > > >> That's much more >> power than just being able to simply print schematics. > > More power, but not easy. The current thread shows how bumpy the > scripting road can be, even to a knowledgeable user. Please don't > claim > more to geda than there actually is. Gets the jobs done for me. > > ---<(kaimartin)>--- > -- > Kai-Martin Knaak tel: > +49-511-762-2895 > Universität Hannover, Inst. für Quantenoptik fax: > +49-511-762-2211 > Welfengarten 1, 30167 Hannover http://www.iqo.uni- > hannover.de > GPG key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=Knaak > +kmk&op=get > > > > _______________________________________________ > geda-dev mailing list > geda-dev@moria.seul.org > http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev John Doty Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd. http://www.noqsi.com/ j...@noqsi.com _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list geda-dev@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
